Ken Register Takes Away a Mother’s Only Child
(“The Alibi,” Forensic Files)
Before launching into the recap, I wanted to offer good wishes and empathy from here in the epicenter as everyone copes with the coronavirus pandemic.
The Crystal Todd case seems like a good choice for this week’s post, because it includes extensive on-camera interviews with such a sympathetic protagonist.
Even toward the end of the show, when Bonnie Todd says she wishes that her daughter’s murderer got the electric chair, she does so in her own gentle way.
Surprise package. The case distinguished itself as the first time that South Carolina prosecutors used DNA as evidence, but what really made the episode memorable was the way it portrayed a mother’s love.
Bonnie talked about being grateful for having a baby at 39 — a common age for a first pregnancy today but not so much back in the early 1970s.
“She was a miracle to me,” Bonnie said. “I just couldn’t believe I had her, and I was proud of her, too.”
Odd wrinkle in case. The two were close. Crystal had confided in Bonnie that best buddy Ken Register, 18, got a little out of line with her once. But neither could foresee the savagery he unleashed on the night of Nov. 17, 1991.
For this week, I searched for information on what happened to Bonnie Todd from the time the Forensic Files episode first aired in 2002 to her death in 2014. I also looked into Ken Register’s whereabouts today.
In the process, I discovered an unusual twist in the case that either happened after the Forensic Files episode finished production or was just too weird for the show’s producers to mentally process. Frankly, I’m having a little trouble with it, too.
Dad gone too soon. So let’s get started on a recap of the “The Alibi,” along with additional information drawn from internet research:
Crystal Faye Todd was born on Jan. 4, 1974, in Conway, South Carolina. Her father, Junior Todd, died when she was 11, but she grew into a happy, fun-loving teenager, according to Forensic Files.
After Crystal and a girlfriend attended a party on the evening of Nov. 17, 1991, the friend dropped Crystal off in a mall parking lot where she’d left her brand-new Celica.
Women’s intuition. When Crystal didn’t come home by her midnight deadline, her mother called the Horry County police. She was so overcome with anxiety that the police at first could barely make out her words or tell whether the caller was a man or a woman, according to the book An Hour to Kill: The True Story of Love, Murder, and Justice in a Small Southern Town by Dale Hudson and Billy Hills.
Next, she contacted her daughter’s longtime close friend Ken Register, who said that he hadn’t seen Crystal all night and that he would check the local hospitals, according to the ID Network series Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.
Bonnie located her daughter’s vacant blue 1991 Toyota, which she’d given her for an early graduation present, in a middle school parking lot.
Disturbing to pros. Sadly, Bonnie didn’t have to wait long to justify her sense of dread.
Hunters found the body of a teenage girl in a ditch the next day. She was wearing a class ring with a shiny purple gemstone and “Crystal Faye Todd” engraved inside.
The murder scene horrified even veteran homicide detectives. In addition to bruises and abrasions, Crystal had 31 cut and stab wounds, including an ear-to-ear gash across the throat, according to court papers.
Lecherous outsider. They found a defensive injury on Crystal’s left hand, but she was no match for the attacker’s weapon, which investigators believe was a 3.5-inch knife with a locking blade.
At first, police had a promising suspect in dark, handsome Andy Tyndall, a grown man who liked to hang around teenage girls. Crystal had known him for a week and already had a little crush on him, according to “Killer Instinct,” a 2011 episode of Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.
Although Crystal and her friends could tell Andy Tyndall was past high school age, they probably didn’t know he was married and wanted by Alabama authorities on a felony charge.
Call the clairvoyants. When law officers came to arrest him in South Carolina, he fled on foot into the woods, with tracker dogs in pursuit.
But all the drama was for naught. Andy Tyndall was quickly cleared.
Next up, investigators turned to criminal profilers. They predicted that the killer would be an angry young white male who was confident the law wouldn’t catch him — and he was probably a friend of the victim.
Revealing genes. Local homicide detective Bill Knowles, who had just visited the FBI Academy, suggested adding the then-new science of DNA testing to the investigation.
Police asked 51 of Crystal’s male friends and acquaintances if they would give samples.
They all said yes.
A lab determined that DNA from the rape kit matched none other than Ken Register — full name, Johnnie Kenneth Register II — the blond-haired blue-eyed onetime varsity football player who Crystal considered her best pal.
Police arrested him in February 1992.
Sterling reputation. Bonnie knew that Ken Register had once offended Crystal by propositioning her for sex despite that he had a girlfriend, but he was the last person she suspected of the murder.
“He’s been our friend for years and years,” said Bonnie, the Herald Rock Hill reported. “He was everybody’s friend around here.”
Ken and Crystal had dated briefly in their early teens and stayed happily friend-zoned afterward, and he seemed like an asset to the community. He got good grades in school and helped out by scrubbing floors at the little church his family attended. He and his father, Kenny, had recently built a wooden altar for the congregation, according to An Hour to Kill.
Just got tarnished. Little did Crystal’s mother know that Ken had a police record for exposing himself to two Coastal Carolina University students not long before Crystal’s disappearance.
It was not the first time that Ken had come to law enforcement’s attention. At 15, he did something that suggested he was no ordinary budding pervert.
He made an obscene phone call to a grown woman and described in sickening detail how he wanted to slit her body open and kill her — in the same way he eventually murdered Crystal, according to Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.
Registering an excuse. Ken might have enjoyed menacing women with talk about blood and gore, but he probably didn’t realize that different bodily fluids contain the same telltale genetic code, which is why he willingly gave samples for DNA testing.
Forensic evidence notwithstanding, Ken had alibis. His girlfriend said they were together at the Dodge City go-cart track in the town of Aynor on the night Crystal died.
In an on-camera interview, Ken’s mother, Shirley Register, sweetly explained that her son got home from his date too early to match the timeline of the crime.
He needed his mom. Nonetheless, law officers arrested Ken Register on Feb. 18, 1992.
While riding in the police car, he asked twice for his mother, according to court papers.
At first, Ken didn’t want to answer questions without his mother present, so officers went to Shirley Register’s house to pick her up, but instead she gave them a note to hand off to her son.
Unauthorized revision. According to Forensic Files, the note told Ken to clam up until they got a lawyer. But court papers said that she simply wrote that she loved him and knew he was innocent.
It mattered little because police, who are legally entitled to lie while questioning a suspect, told him that they had found his footprints at the murder scene (they didn’t) and that the note from his mother instructed him to tell the truth (it didn’t).
The interrogation tricks worked. Ken cracked.
Hidden blade. The night of the murder, he and Crystal spotted each other at a traffic light, he said. She then parked her car at the middle school and got into his vehicle, where they had consensual sex — but she threatened to accuse of him of rape, so he panicked and stabbed her, he contended.
Investigators begged to differ. There was no consensual sex. She had severe wounding consistent with rape. After killing her, Ken further defiled and stabbed her body, investigators determined.
They never found the murder weapon. Ken said he tossed away the knife as far as he could near the scene of the crime, according to an AP account.
What a spectacle. As if Ken needed any more bad publicity, in a separate court action before his homicide trial kicked off, he was found guilty of exposing himself to the college students. Ken claimed he was actually clothed during the incident and that he stood up in his car and shimmied himself around because the women “wouldn’t give me the time of day” and “made me feel like trash,” according to An Hour to Kill.
The homicide trial didn’t go so well either.
In front of 400 spectators, Ken Register was convicted of Crystal Todd’s sexual assault, murder, and kidnapping.
Girlfriend backs away. The jury declined to give him the death penalty because of his young age. Circuit Judge Edward B. Cottingham sentenced him to life without parole and 35 years to be served consecutively.
Ken’s sweetheart, Angela Rabon, made a few “dutiful” visits to him in prison, then wrote him a breakup letter and headed to college, according to An Hour to Kill.
Over the years, Ken and defense attorneys Morgan Martin and Tommy Brittain made efforts to get him out of prison on two feet.
Character assassination. In 1996, the supreme court of South Carolina was not impressed by Register’s claims that police violated his rights during questioning and that the DNA testing method was below par. In fact, the prosecution had given the defense an opportunity to do its own independent DNA tests, but Ken Register told his lawyers not to, according to An Hour to Kill.
Ken also tried the requisite smear-the-victim ploy in hopes that some nefarious acquaintance of hers would be accused. He said that he heard rumors that Crystal used drugs and he had seen her drink alcohol and smoke marijuana, contradicting his own statement from 1992 that he had never seen Crystal using marijuana, according to reporting from the Horry Independent.
He claimed he initially lied because he didn’t want Crystal’s alleged drug use to somehow sully his own reputation — he had only used the recreational drug a few times in his life when someone happened to pass around a joint, Ken said, as reported by the Horry Independent on Feb. 3, 2000.
Oh, please. Always a gentleman, Register also said he didn’t know whether it was true, but he heard rumors that Crystal “slept around” and that she had helped distribute LSD, the Horry Independent reported.
Shirley Register chimed in, saying she heard Crystal would sometimes leave a party with one guy, then return to pick up another guy or two. She also tried to lend credence to the drug-dealing theory by suggesting that Bonnie and Crystal had too meager a combined legitimate income to afford their lifestyle — and that Crystal rode to school with a student rumored to sell LSD, according to the Horry Independent.
Ken claimed that, at the same time that Crystal’s morals were deteriorating, he himself was embarking on the straight and narrow, thanks to his serious relationship with Angela Rabon.
Writer in their corner. Though vexing to Crystal’s friends and family, the Registers’ tactics are pretty standard, something Forensic Files watchers have seen countless times.
The outlandish twist in the case came after a world-famous author caught the trial coverage on court TV.
Mickey Spillane, writer of the 1940s detective mystery novel “I, the Jury” — and 25 other books in that genre that sold a total of 200 million copies — thought Ken Register got a raw deal.
Audience with a convict. He and his wife, Jane Spillane, who lived in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, believed prosecutor Ralph Wilson framed him.
The Spillanes met with Ken in person and “came to the conclusion that the young man was incapable of committing such a heinous act,” the Washington Post would later report.
Jane Spillane went so far as to run for county prosecutor herself so that she could personally bestow justice upon Ken.
Drama continues. She didn’t win, and both Spillanes later admitted that the law had weighty evidence against Ken Register. They ultimately concluded that Crystal’s murder couldn’t be the work of a single assailant.
The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, however, didn’t find Ken Register particularly endearing and refused to hear his case.
Ken’s bid for post-conviction relief failed as well. “It’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while,” Bonnie Todd commented upon the ruling, as reported by the Charlotte Observer.
Gang assault. Today, Ken Register resides in Broad River Correctional Institution, a high-security prison that houses South Carolina’s death chamber.
The Department of Corrections doesn’t list any escape attempts or disciplinary problems for Ken. And at 5’8″ and 223 pounds, he isn’t staging any hunger strikes either.
It would serve him well to keep a low profile. In 2019, DOC police charged a female Broad River guard after she allegedly unlocked an inmate’s door and allowed 11 other prisoners to enter his cell and beat him up.
Closing the loop. Fortunately for Ken himself, he still has a large support network of family members living in and around Conway, South Carolina, to speak up for him should he face abuse while on the inside.
But enough about Ken Register — what about the mother of the girl whose life he took?
By the time Bonnie appeared on Forensic Files in 2002, Crystal had been gone for 11 years, but her melancholy clearly hadn’t lifted.
Sojourn to Gotham. The murder “devastated her more so than any other family member I’ve ever dealt with,” longtime Horry County homicide detective Bill Knowles would later tell a local ABC affiliate.
But Bonnie, who told Forensic Files that the only time she wasn’t thinking about Crystal was when she was sleeping, did get to have a bit of an adventure.
In the 1990s, she traveled to New York City to appear on Sally Jesse Raphael’s popular talk show along with county prosecutor Ralph Wilson, who later recalled that Bonnie packed instant grits in her travel bags in case Manhattan’s eateries didn’t serve them, according to a Sun News account.
Honored with a song. She also enjoyed a friendship with Ralph Wilson for years after Register’s conviction and often brought him small gifts of food from a garden she cultivated.
Bonnie Faye Todd died at age 79 on Sept. 3, 2014.
Toward the end of her life, she had become close to a niece who she “affectionately referred to” as her “adopted daughter,” according to Bonnie’s obituary.
A music video that two local gospel singers made as a tribute to Bonnie and her lost daughter has so far scored 12,000 hits on YouTube.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
Thanks, Rebecca – one I’ve seen more than once and about which I followed-up on Bonnie to find she’d died. Yes, her heartbreak was palpable and one felt so sorry for her.
‘…the women “wouldn’t give me the time of day” and “made me feel like trash…”’ – and they were right!
But let me get this straight: Register (another Howdy-Doody lookalike) confessed to the crime (while distorting some facts) and there was ample corroborative evidence, yet, somehow, they’re not convinced? Were they in their own-penned crime Wonderland?
What I can’t figure from your narrative is how smearing Crystal’s reputation affected his admission that he killed her. Did he subsequently try to withdraw the confession? If not I can’t see the relevance of his strategy. However sleazy he tried to establish she was (and therefore that she had sleazy acquaintances who could’ve killed her) – he’s committed himself to the homicide… Furthermore, having two convictions for arguably related offences – threatening a woman; exposing himself – would negate any residual credibility. This fact also shows the Spillane’s opinion as absurd. Nothing he said could be faintly trusted.
I recall his mother conveying as simply unable to ‘hear’ the overwhelming evidence her little darling could’ve done this. Sad for her, to be sure, but one hears her protesting his innocence today – or at least victim-blaming if she accepts he stabbed Crystal – in the face of brutal evidence that she bore a sick boy (no fault of her own).
I think he recanted the story that he stabbed Crystal, regardless of the reason, so he needed a fall guy, hence the gossip about alleged sleazy associates.
Glad you found Bonnie Todd as interesting as I did. She’s memorable.
Saying ‘they’re not convinced,’ I mean the Spillanes.
That makes sense – he recanted. I wonder how he explains the admission? The police beat me up / I hadn’t slept for three days / I’d been starved… Pull the other one, Mr R…
I should acknowledge that false confessions DO occur, and although confession is powerfully influential to juries, of itself it isn’t, nor should it be, nearly enough to convict because of this. There must always be corroborative evidence – and there was a whole heap in this case.
Undoubtedly police have railroaded suspects into false confession, or psychological fragility may issue it. Even with it, as much care must be taken to garner evidence as with denial, and police must be truth- not confession-seekers.
He won’t get out in 2022. They like people to admit what they’ve done and reflect on it. He’s still saying he didn’t do it and so is his mama. He hasn’t learned a thing. Where is his mama today?
Nancy: They DO like admission – but parole’s generally (may be required in some states) no longer contingent upon admission, as it’s now recognised, because of wrongful convictions, that this would be invidious and could compromise post-prison innocence action.
I have a case in mind – I can’t recall the name – of a man wrongly convicted and imprisoned for many years, who refused to ‘admit’ and remained imprisoned longer because of it. He was eventually exonerated. Although hard cases make bad law, I think it came to be seen that admission of guilt by a guilty person who served time and otherwise merited parole was neither here nor there; but for the very occasional innocent person it added insult to injury.
In the final analysis, many perps with parole in sight would and could later say they only admitted guilt to get out. Tragically, that’s also applied to some innocent convicts…
The brutality of this crime is more than enough reason to keep Register behind bars the rest of his life.
“Circuit Judge Edward B. Cottingham sentenced him to life without parole and 35 years to be served consecutively.”
So how is he eligible for parole in 2022?
One thing I’ve learned while doing research for this blog over the years is that the rules governing sentencings and the way they’re carried out are more complicated than they sound at the outset. So often there are mitigating provisions that the convict’s lawyer can argue should apply post-sentencing.
I live in Horry County, where Crystal Faye Todd was murdered by Ken Register. He got life plus 30, how is he getting up for parole next year!!!!!!! And her poor mother died 7 years ago, what an outrage.
Thanks for writing in from the frontlines in S.C.! I agree with you — he’s a disturbed, sadistic killer who should stay in captivity.
He refused to go to the parole hearing. It wasn’t that he was denied bond.
Did they ever explain how Crystal’s family could afford the Celica? Not smearing the girl in any way, and Ken is a creep, but still, that was an expensive ride, and I can see why the defense would bring that up. Did she work a job during high school?
I was never able to find occupations for any of the parties. Whatever she did for a living, Bonnie seemed like a modest soul who put aside most of what she earned for her daughter. Crystal probably received her father’s Social Security because she was only 11 when he died.
As it came from her family (her mother, seemingly), why would it be of significance? I CAN’T see why the defence would raise it (did they?), given that Crystal would have to be in cahoots with her mother to have raised the money from questionable sources to buy a new car (I doubt a 17-yr-old with a wad of $ bills appearing at a dealer wouldn’t raise questions, if even legally possible, hence her mother was almost certainly the purchaser and highly likely to have been able to account for her ability to pay). Indeed, the car may have been purchased on credit, negating the need for putative ill-gotten gains.
Crystal HAD just got her license back following revocation for DUI – so the ‘she drank alcohol’ claim, while wholly irrelevant to the crime, is true.
This car question is a blind alley…
Even if his LOP sentence were replaced for one with parole by some fluke it’s highly unlikely he’d be given it (as you suggest). His related convictions add ‘perversion’ to murder, which adds up to a dangerous, risky person. Theoretical possibility of parole is informed by this description from an appeal court doc:
“On November 17, 1991, two deer hunters found the mutilated body of seventeen year old Crystal Faye Todd (Victim) in a ditch on a dirt road in Horry County. The Victim had over thirty different cuts and stabs, seven bruises, and three abrasions. Her throat had been slashed from ear to ear, she had been stabbed in a linear pattern down her chest, and she had been disemboweled. Semen was found in the Victim’s mouth, rectum, and vagina, and bruises to her vaginal and rectal areas were consistent with brutal vaginal and anal rape.”
https://law.justia.com/cases/south-carolina/supreme-court/1996/24479-2.html
An appalling, vicious, frenzied, perverse attack, about which it seems to me no parole board could declare Register safe to release. He was 18, too, so legally an adult. The ONLY potential mitigation he could claim was youth/immaturity/drug impairment – but that couldn’t conceivably erode the dreadful nature of his crime. Of course, these claims aren’t open to him in any case since he denies the crime…
The suspect deserves to be locked up for the rest of his life.
Bonnie Faye Todd was such a memorable person to me and so sad that I was actually glad to hear that she had finally passed and was reunited with her loved ones. I think that’s all Bonnie Faye wanted was to die so she could be with Crystal. I thought I heard in one of the the shows about her that Crystal did have a job. Bonnie probably worked, too. That plus her dad’s social security would’ve been enough to finance a car. Ken Register is a sexual deviant, no question. Releasing him from prison would be basically putting every woman he came into contact with in danger. His mother is/was never going to believe her sweet baby boy would or could do anything like he did. I don’t know how she explains his other arrests’, the cops probably framed him for those, also. Thanks for the updates. I was looking up Brian Leslie Vaughn because the FF was about him just now and found your page. I subscribed and look forward to reading what’s already here, and the new topics to come.
Thanks for the kind words and for subscribing, Robin. I agree about Bonnie Faye Todd — she was biding time until she could be with her daughter again.
Register had been a friend to both Bonnie and Crystal, as Rebecca notes – a double betrayal, and just perverse that he was a pallbearer (I think; he certainly had a prominent role at the funeral).
In light of Aaron Hernandez’s story and Post Concussion Syndrome and CTE. Wondering if anyone has ever looked into that, as a possible reason for a seemingly great kid to turn so evil. Given that he was so much into sports and football. Just curious.
But he wasn’t a ‘seemingly great kid’! Where do you get that from? There were a number of disturbing incidents prior to the murder. I think you mean that in some respects he seemed (the operative word) respectable. That’s because his police record wasn’t known publicly and likely because he was the ‘charming monster’ that’s a homicide trope (Bundy perhaps being the most notorious example).
Even if there was anything of the Hernandez condition, it’s another matter entirely whether that is in related to homicidal behaviour. There is NO accepted evidence that footballers’ brain injuries renders them (more) violent as they get older and certainly NO association with homicide. As always, the most ‘economic’ explanation is the best explanation: Register was a sexual pervert who either went too far and had to murder Crystal to prevent her rape (or attempted) claim, or – even worse – intended to kill her for the sexual frisson. Postulating neurological injury as explanation (and therefore mitigation) is, to say the least, left of field…
Ken Register did have a ‘Great Kid’ persona around town and in high school.He was a blonde haired blue eyed football player who helped old ladies cross the street, but it was a mask he wore and perpetuated. Bonnie Faye said that Crystal had told her Ken was hitting on her ‘again’ but all he wanted was sex, which makes me think he did without a doubt rape her, during the murder and then after. In fact the M.E. said so. It wasn’t consensual if that’s what you’re alluding to. It was what he basically described in the obscene phone call that he got caught doing. You’re definitely right about his police record being a secret from the town but, what about his mother? I don’t know how old he was when that phone call happened but she had to know something. I get that Ken was a mama’s boy and she couldn’t believe he could do something so horrific (what mother could?) but didn’t Mrs Register say Ken had to walk through her room to get to his? Bonnie Faye said he had to be covered in blood and his mother had to have seen it. He probably had been sneaking right past her sleeping for years. I’m glad he was caught before he murdered again, because there is no rehabilitation for parasites like Ken Register.
Well, he could’ve washed somewhere before going home or his mother was out at the time. Whatever, it’s a detail. If you’re suggesting that she may have seen something probative yet still refuted his murderousness, who knows? There are plenty of parents who refuse to accept their children killed (see the latest post on Rachael Mullenix here; her father and brother – somewhat incoherently – maintain she’s no killer YET/AND she was provoked by a mad mother), and we understand why. Ditto spouses, etc. It’s more psychologically acceptable to engage in cognitive dissonance – being credulous – than acknowledge the horrible reality – particularly when the ‘blame’ can be displaced to another or co-defendant.
Sometimes, of course, the person knows – or believe they know – the truth but maintain the innocence claim for public consumption. I suspect this may be the case per Michael Peterson: the family can’t possibly be sure he’s innocent; they may think he’s guilty; and it’s just easier all round to pretend they think he’s innocent.
Ted Bundy’s mother – while perhaps not being apprised of the overwhelming evidence against her son, or refusing to engage with it, said she only accepted his guilt when he confessed, shortly before the execution. Perhaps a more educated woman would’ve been more prepared to confront the evidence – I don’t know. But if it’s a straight choice between believing your child and police/court, you’ll be desperate to believe the child.
I understand your claim that Register had (I’d prefer to term it) a harmless jock persona – since he palpably wasn’t ‘great’ (charming, perhaps). What people mean when they use that term is ‘harmless’. He seemed harmless, friendly. Perhaps there’s a lesson here: the blond, blue-eyed jock was regarded as normal – All American. A nerd non-sportsman who didn’t mix well would’ve been the far more credible rapist-murderer in the eyes of those who talk of ‘seeming’ – the locals, say. This phenomenon is well illustrated by Hernandez, alluded to above. Somehow, because he was ‘All American’ (a sportsman) he was utterly wholesome. Except he wasn’t.
Homicide teaches us that judging books by their covers is, literally, fatally flawed, even unto our loved ones, who may do terrible things (not that we can go through life regarding them with suspicion…)
I moved to Conway, SC in 2001. I would see Bonnie Faye fairly frequently around town. I had no idea who she was but every time I saw her the sadness in her eyes and radiating off of her was palpable. When I found out who she was it all made sense.
Grieving for her daughter, and knowing an apparent family friend was the perp: agonizing.
RR, Help me out here. I thought Ken Register got life without parole and 35 years to be served consecutively. However, under his photo it states that Ken Register will be eligible for parole in 2022. Which one is it? or have I missed something?
https://law.justia.com/cases/south-carolina/supreme-court/1996/24479-2.html
He got life, but not without parole, though it’s extremely unlikely he’ll get it then, if at all. Reports of LWOP – likely sloppy journalism – are incorrect (and I can find no reference to a changed sentence); again, his age may have prevented it.
Jurors interviewed by a lawyer after the January 1993 verdict gave Register’s age – 19 at the time – as the reason he was spared the death penalty. He received a life sentence for murder, thirty years consecutive for Crim Sex Cond, and five years consecutive for buggery and sodomy. Because the kidnapping resulted in murder, there was no sentence for the kidnapping conviction.
Sentence Start Date 02/18/1992
Sentence Length LIFE SENTENCE
Admission Date 01/26/1993
Projected Parole Date 02/18/2022
Supervised Furlough Eligibility
Sex Offender Registry – Yes
Good question, Willie. Sometimes, as Marcus said, LWOP is added on to the sentence not by the court but rather by the media.
Just to add to Rebecca’s: some journalists seem to assume ‘life’ means LWOP (semantically understandable), rather than its actually meaning ‘up to life but with possibility of parole’. Most life sentences permit the possibility. The particularly heinous nature of this murder could’ve militated against parole, with relative youth in favour. If he gets it, I can’t see it before his 70s (prisons don’t want to be ‘caring’ for the burgeoning old-aged prisoner cohort: disability, vulnerability, hospital admission, staff-intensiveness, combined with considerably reduced risk to public).
Register should die the way Crystal was brutally murdered by him.
Had he done this crime in TX at the same time early 1990s, he would get the death penalty I’m sure.
I am also sure, unless his appeals got him another trial, he would have been executed by now.
TX has life for murder, but you serve 40 yrs then come up for parole every three years. Few people last that long in prison here. TX uses the death penalty since we have so many horrific crimes here. I’ve lost track of how many similar crimes of rape murder of young women I’ve seen here over 30 yrs. Check TX death row information page and see what some criminals have done to others. Sorry–you can’t go easy on serial killers or rapists killers.
Two odd connections with the trial. One of the detectives was a scuba diver. We took winter trips to the springs in FLA and the Keys. About a dozen people. One trip he has a box of images. Maybe during or shortly after trial. They were pics of the murder scene and the victim. Just odd, but remember asking what was this or that. Remember one what was sand that had dried to her skin. Like going to the beach. Just bizarre as to why bring the pics. Strange viewing TBH. The second connection was the Spillane lady cruising bars and asking questions. She was determined. With a friend, we were at some country bar, and these older ladies were asking us questions. We debated why he would confess and the DNA. Where was I etc… like WTF? How am I supposed to know ten years later? She was a loonie bird and a self promoter. The recent news on crooked detectives gives me pause. The detective was convinced. DNA doesn’t lie. Just two odd twists in a sad local story. Kept thinking to myself… am I a suspect? SMH
First parole hearing apparently coming up:
https://www.wmbfnews.com/2022/01/20/shocking-online-petition-protesting-parole-hearing-man-convicted-1991-horry-county-murder/
Thanks for sending! Coincidentally, I was talking to one of the original homicide investigators this week and he plans on attending any parole hearings to urge the board to vote no.
Second parole hearing due 02/24. He forfeited the first two years prior (there was public agitation that he be denied) so it’ll be interesting to see if he does so again. Although this was a heinous murder and probably deserves whole-life – he is a dangerous pervert per other convictions too – because he was 18, per immaturity I wouldn’t absolutely rule out old-age parole (70+ – less capable of physical assault, though children could be victimised if there was any evidence of paedophilic interest). I appreciate many will disagree.
If his mother’s still alive, is she still as deluded? She absolutely refuted his guilt – but given his prior convictions for sex-related crime, it’s plain to anyone compos mentis that there was something significantly wrong with him (even though he does appear to have had a semblance of charm cloaking his dysfunction that misled some). The mother had no answer on FF to repeated DNA tests over subsequent years identifying him as attacker/rapist. It’s disturbing that love is *that* blind that it entails absurd denial instead of acceptance (of fact), adjustment (to it) and forgiveness.
I’m reminded of a case here in UK: a man (Colin Pitchfork) who sexually assaulted and murdered two ‘teen girls, then got a friend to substitute for the DNA test. This was the first DNA murder conviction in UK (the sub ruse was rumbled by police). Incredibly he was paroled (I with many others objected to it), but almost immediately breached the conditions and was returned to prison. In this case I considered he should never be released because of two child murders, on sep occasions – showing incorrigibility and by an adult. In Register’s case there is one murder and he was about the same age as his victim.
As a mom, taking away our loved ones is like a nightmare to me. Thank you for sharing this!